A DI$COUNT UNIVER$E Retrospective Is Heading To Melbourne

It’s a brand, an idea, an image, a dialogue, a design, a label, a personality, a website, a garment, an emotion and an evolution. DI$COUNT UNIVER$E is a million different things to a million different people, and tomorrow the designers behind it – Nadia Napreychikov and Cami James – will open their it’s-too-soon-for-a-retrospective exhibition at their studio space in Collingwood.

From November 29 – December 9, over 65 mannequins will display in excess of 500 limited edition garments from the DI$COUNT UNIVER$E archive. Instead of neatly curating a handful of pieces, DU are bucking the trend as only they can and displaying their entire body of work to the public for the first time. The pieces collated for the exhibition have been sourced from the designers’ personal archives, private collections and from their Australian and international PR showrooms as well as borrowed back from celebrities. Yes, even Katy Perry’s custom-made ‘Birthday Suit’ and Madonna’s studded biker jacket from her ‘Bitch I’m Madonna’ film clip will be on display in all of their garish glory. The brand’s signature DIY aesthetic translates across the entire exhibition from hand-painted glitter mannequins to their handwritten credits for the works, stuck to the floors and walls of the gallery.

“In general, as a brand, we purposely go against the grain of what is done in the arena we work in,” Napreychikov says. “We do this to challenge the system. To prove there are other ways of working. To show our supporters and other young people in our field that it is possible to pave your own path without having all of the resources, you create your own resources.”

“The idea behind DU was that it was much more than simply selling clothing,” her partner-in-crime James adds. “That all the tiny aspects surrounding the brand weren’t just isolated add-ons to help sell clothes – they were the whole vision re-embodied again and again.”